Yes, it collects your email when you install. This lets me send a couple onboarding messages and determine what plan you are on. There's more info in the (human readable) privacy policy.
When I started this project I wanted the onboarding experience to be as simple as possible, i.e. no annoying sign up stage. I wondered whether this approach would lead to lots of questions like yours: in fact, I think less than 5 people have asked about this since 2015. My sense is that, on balance, most people benefit from the "install = sign-up" flow.
> Fixing the hive-mind is going to be a billion dollar industry
Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org. At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email.
I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I'm happy to talk about this stuff whenever.
In 2015, the European Commission published a report which included the following [1]:
> We believe that societies must protect, cherish and nurture humans’ attentional capabilities. This does not mean giving up searching for improvements: that shall always be useful. Rather, we assert that attentional capabilities are a finite, precious and rare asset. In the digital economy, attention is approached as a commodity to be exchanged on the market place, or to be channelled in work processes. But this instrumental approach to attention neglects the social and political dimensions of it, i.e., the fact that the ability and the right to focus our own attention is a critical and necessary condition for autonomy, responsibility, reflexivity, plurality, engaged presence, and a sense of meaning. To the same extent that organs should not be exchanged on the market place, our attentional capabilities deserve protective treatment. Respect for attention should be linked to fundamental rights such as privacy and bodily integrity, as attentional capability is an inherent element of the relational self for the role it plays in the development of language, empathy, and collaboration. We believe that, in addition to offering informed choices, the default settings and other designed aspects of our technologies should respect and protect attentional capabilities.
(The report was co-authored by Luciano Floridi, who is supervising James Williams' PhD at Oxford.)
> If this is true Then it also presents a unique opportunity. I.e. There should be a very real and observable productivity boost from being able to ignore
B J Fogg, who gets brief mention in this article, teaches his students to cause behaviour by making the behaviour easy and then delivering timely triggers [1]. If you find yourself behaving in ways you don't reflectively endorse, your basic approach should be to flip the Fogg model upside down – avoid triggers and make it harder.
In my own case, that's meant disabling notifications and blocking websites and apps. I also hacked a Chrome extension which applies the "avoid triggers and make it harder" idea to Gmail [2]. The extension has several thousand users, many of whom reclaim 30-60 minutes of focussed work each week which would otherwise be lost to compulsive inbox processing.
If you enjoyed the article and want a more detailed discussion, James Williams gave a talk on this topic at the RSA in May [1], and did an interview with David Runciman in July [2].
From the transcript of the TED talk [1] mentioned in the OP:
> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.
> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect.
> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising.
> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.
1. Searched the Chrome Web Store, Twitter and Google for users who had said lukewarm or negative things about another extension which addresses a similar user problem in a different way.
2. Searched the same places for people who were clearly interested in the topic of focus and email productivity.
I spent a day or so manually emailing several hundred people in this way. This initial push - and the events that it lead to (e.g. people I contacted recommending the extension to others) - got me 100 WAU within a couple of weeks (and lots of helpful feedback).
(I tried some other things which were much less effective. Listing sites, in particular, were largely a waste of time, though my Product Hunt submission came good when the extension was featured a few months later.)
> I can't take this situation anymore and this is a cry from the heart.
> I am so frustrated right now, I don't understand why everything takes so long, this process is unbearable.
Meta advice: if I were you, I'd take a break for a few days and focus on getting your feelings about this back to a calmer, constructive, cheerful place.
If you're not sure how to do this, I'd say: start with vigorous exercise every day [1], do things you normally enjoy, and consider mindfulness meditation [2].
We're seeing 30-50% of visitors blocking Google Analytics client side tracking at 80000hours.org. Target audience is university educated 18-30 year olds, ~100K unique visitors / month.
The folks at Segment.io warn their users to expect ~20%, with the caveat that blocking rates vary wildly between demographics [1].
When there are ongoing eruptions in Iceland, there are usually several companies that offer flights or helicopter tours to go see them. The tours normally cost $1-2k per person. Another option is to go hang out at the domestic airport in Reykjavík. Talk to a few people and you may find a private pilot who just wants to split the fuel cost.
> Isn't it dangerous to fly over erupting volcanos?
I'm not a pilot, but I trusted the judgement of the pilot and felt like it was worth the risk. The pilot planned our approaches carefully and though we got quite low, we were always circling around rather than going directly over the fissure. At the time the Icelandic aviation authorities had issued a warning (but no closure) for the airspace around the volcano.
The spectacle was so moving that fear wasn't a prominent emotion. The only hair-raising part was when we flew too low over some lava (shortly after this photograph was taken: https://www.flickr.com/photos/41812768@N07/15145875322/in/al...). The turbulent air from the heat shook the aircraft so violently that my headset came off.
I bought an iPad Pro recently, so I can leave the 16" plugged in at the office.